


Starving

by twosockles



Category: Futur Radio, Original Work
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Character Study, Depression, Eye Trauma, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Intersex, Intersex Character, Non-binary character, Temp tag: This is a test to see if ao3 will let me post this stuff on here, off-screen violence, thats the off screen violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-11-01 22:02:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17875655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twosockles/pseuds/twosockles
Summary: For as long as he can remember, he has always been starving.(Original Character study.)





	Starving

For as long as he can remember, he has always been starving.

When he was younger it was for food. He was a thin, frail boy in an orphanage who never quite got enough to eat. A boy whose high sense of morality prevented him from stealing from the kitchens or swiping from other children's plates.

He consumes books and knowledge faster than he can get his hands on them. Books on any subject, in every corner of every place he can get into. He wants more, always more, but one day there is nothing left. So, he turns to radios. He learns how they work and how to fix them when they break. It's a fascinating world, and he loses himself in it while the other children run around and get into mischief. He is insatiable, filling in the gaps left where the warmth of family and friendship should have been with cold logic.

School speeds by, as the adults evaluating him notice his hunger for knowledge and call it ‘protégé’. Highschool is an afterthought once his teachers realize he doesn't belong with the rest. His love of learning and distaste for his peers drives him to move on. Fast, faster, never stopping, he makes his way to university just shy of fifteen years.

It's a terrible first year, his shorter than average size is exemplified through his young age. He feels so small and insignificant and yet as if all eyes are on him at once. The dorm room remains impersonal throughout the year, and while he passes all his classes with good grades, he barely makes it through the year.

Summer school is next.

He calls up the number on a “seeking roommate” advertisement on a bulletin board. They're Jewish, like him, and it's small, but there's a stirring sense like he might belong somewhere for once. They're older than him by several years, but somehow they make a friendship work. That summer is his happiest memory.

The second year flies by with a significantly decreased desire to die. Until that summer brings something new.

He's sixteen when he realizes he isn't deserving of the pronoun "he". It starts suddenly, waking up one day with a pain in his chest, and a lump under the skin. Something is wrong, but the information he needs is hard to access, and by the time he has the answer, he's decided to swap out slacks for skirts.

Partial androgen insensitivity.

That's the worst part. Being partially something. Biologically unable to commit to one side of the binary. She doesn't grow facial hair or have too deep of a voice. It's husky, but she's blonde, petite, and never spoke much anyways. Her roommates are remarkably understanding. Yet it feels wrong still.

She's insatiable. He's always craving an answer to this mess of identity. She craves an answer that leaves her satisfied. He's tired of doubting herself. The feeling that had been gestating since his early days back in the orphanage come to a head. The feeling that she isn't a boy. The feeling that he isn't a girl either. They become one and the same and ricochet so hard in their head that he can't focus anymore. 

Third year scraps by like their grades. 

They decide to cut their hair and change into "boy clothing" for their graduation photo. There's no place for them, and it's 'them' because with no compromise it feels like two separate selves shouting in his head. There's no room for someone who doesn't fit the social mould, for someone one reads about as a case study in a textbook and over hear classmates giggling at.

They slip farther and farther away from their roommates-turned-friends. His roommates try to help, but they're too afraid to be vulnerable. So, they try to adhere to being male again. To get with the program, stop having it both ways. They try to forget the stifling feeling of masculinity. 'They' become one again, and 'they' becomes 'he'. When university ends, he's alone both in his head and in social ties.

At 18 he falls for someone. It's a chance meeting, but he sees the most beautiful person he's ever seen in his life. Someone who might not be the western standard of beauty, but for him, it was as if a light he never thought could exist had appeared in the dark. Long fingers in a warm brown hue tapping against a novel, a nose that was big for a slender face, but so perfectly, breathtakingly straight. Eyes surrounded by thin lines, that met his just for a moment, but held a life inside that he’d never seen before.

He never sees them again, but wishes he could.

It's hopeless, but he starts taking the bus more just in case there's another chance encounter between them. That's when he starts seeing, truly seeing for the first time how many shapes and colours people come in, how they always seem to be connected in a giant, multicoloured web to one another. It's a sharp blow to realize that he's not part of any of it.

He realizes he's been starving for something else entirely, something no problem solved will give him, something a book can only allude to. Yet it's something realized too late.

He gets desperate.

This is the part when things get strange, foggy. As if someone had taken the film of his life and held a lighter underneath it, watching as the material bubbles and crisp away, held together by a thread of crumbling plastic. A section of his life in which has been forever lost, unable to be claimed by recollection. When the film resumes once again, he's laying on the back porch of a stranger’s yard, starving and blinded in his left eye.

The owner finds him in the morning and takes him in with few questions. He does try, though it’s quickly apparent that the boy he took in didn’t have much to say. His family name is Ross, police Lieutenant Ross, and he’s introduced to the family as a guest; his wife is kind, and his young daughter takes to him like and older brother. He becomes part of their life, and it's a new reel now, one with hope.  
The memories come back like flecks of ashes in the wind, bit by bit but never the full movie. Something happened, something big and bad. 'Realistically', says Ross one night, lending him another cigarette on the patio, 'you should want to get those answers'. Yet he's tired down to his bone and just wants a nice boring life. Just wants to be satiated. Answers would leave him hungrier. 

Ross gives him a second chance at life; a place to belong, people to belong to, and a job to help him get back on his feet. He never forgets that, even if being a secretary sometimes feels like a waste of his years spent in school.

He wonders what the old him would have thought. He's not the same person anymore. Something more than his eye is gone, something new is missing on top of everything else. The memories aren't the same, and not all of them are there. He wonders, with the parts of him missing, if he still deserves to be called Lou.

As long as he can remember though, he has always been starving.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written back in September 2018 as a character study for Lou (a character in a project of mine) and it got a lot of good reception. If Ao3 doesn't delete this by next week, I will keep uploading the rest of the ~15 works I've made since creating this one! Thanks for deciding to check this out!
> 
> (If you want to leave a comment and refer to the character, Lou uses They/Them and He/Him pronouns).


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